At that time my passing interest in politics caused me to realise that the political landscape in Australia looked nothing like the community landscape and if our elected representatives were to better represent the community landscape then some significant cut and fill was needed. In other words, those elected to the Australian Parliament came in large proportions from the legal and teaching professions and from the union movement and disturbingly, increasingly from a purely political background. That is, people whose only work experience was in politics before becoming a politician.

 

At the time I had no ambition to stand for political office as I was more than fully occupied with my Surveying and Mapping business which was busy adopting new technologies such as Geographic Information Systems and Global Positioning Systems. However in hindsight my paper at that conference may well have been the start of the process which saw me elected to the Australian Parliament in 1996.

 

During my almost 12 years in Parliament I was one of only about half a dozen out of 226 Members and Senators who could boast a truly practical science background, such as surveying or engineering, a fact that had its positives and negatives.

 

As a Member of Parliament I saw my role as having three main aspects: representing the people within my electorate in the Parliament, helping to deliver better services to them, and working to improve their standard of living; which in my view covers their social, economic and environmental circumstances. In fact that last aspect is really what government is all about.

 

So how did I achieve those goals of delivering better services and improving my constituents well being? There is no short answer to that question but a significant part of the answer is through the use of technology including spatial information.

 

It wasn’t easy explaining all this to some of my political colleagues, however I was able to demonstrate it. I personally adopted the technologies to assist me in managing and holding the very marginal electorate I represented. Well it worked for 4 elections at least!

 

In my first re-election campaign I produced localised maps of the various regions of my electorate and overlayed the many projects I had been working with the community on to highlight the funding gained and the various achievements. In political terms, a picture that demonstrates achievements is always so much more convincing than a page of words.

 

I also used spatial information combined with demographic data to convince Ministers that certain Government projects should be located in my electorate. A 100 person Defence Service Centre was gained for a town of 8,000 people, in part by utilising GIS technologies.

 

When I became Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister my major responsibilities were Water Reform and coordinating R&D related to domestic counter terrorism. Both responsibilities gave me opportunities to promote the importance and benefits of spatial information at the very highest level of government.

 

Water reform required cooperation with the States and Territories which highlighted the many problems in spatial data, such as completeness, standards and interoperability.

 

The critical role that spatial information played in simulating potential terrorism targets can never be overstated. Such a simulation presented at the Prime Minister’s Science and Engineering Council meeting helped crystallise to the Prime Minister and other Government Ministers the power of location.

 

But as Special Minister of State I was able to push spatial information a lot harder. In this role one of my major responsibilities was e-government on a whole-of-government basis. In Australia between 80 and 90% of our legislation has a spatial element, so developing e-Government in isolation to spatial information would be counter-productive and would in fact be a very poor use of taxpayers’ funds.

 

It is not possible to achieve efficient service delivery through e-government without the involvement of spatial information. Spatially enabled government (SEG) will always have a key role to play in good e-government strategies.